There’s no such thing as junk mail…

Try this experiment. Walk up to any group of people who don’t work in the world of direct marketing and attempt to complete this sentence: “There is no such thing as junk mail, only misdirected information.” If you get past the comma’s pause in this phrase, without being interrupted, there’s a good chance that nobody’s listening to you. I’ve tried this myself. On the rare occasion that I’ve gotten the whole sentence out before being verbally accosted, I still had to contend with looks that conveyed something like “are you for real?”

More often I use this phrase to educate those outside our industry. It happens something like this. Attending a gathering where people are getting to know one another, business or otherwise, the inevitable question is asked: So, what do you do? I work with a company that supports the direct marketing industry by providing address hygiene, enhanced contact information, and other data management services. Huh? Well, our company helps anyone who wants to deliver a message to a particular audience reach that audience with greater accuracy and in the most cost effective manner possible. Hmmm… can you give me an example? Well, a simple example might be the postcard you receive for a $16.95 oil change special at the service station near your home. Oh – you send out junk mail! Not exactly, you see we believe that “there is no such thing as junk mail, only misdirected information.”

With all of the forces at play in direct mail marketing today, from the green movement to the cost of print and postage, there’s every reason to expect that smart direct mail campaigns will employ every possible means to reduce or eliminate so called “junk mail.” In my next post I’ll write more about how we can influence the perception, and the experience, of consumers who bristle at the suggestion that there is no such thing as junk mail.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
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